Within just a month, 12 Solana-based memecoins, originally raised $26.7 million through presales, have been abandoned, highlighting such cryptocurrency ventures' volatile and speculative nature. This development echoes the precarious ICO frenzy of 2017.

Twelve Solana Memecoins Abandoned After Raising $26.7M; 'I Like This Coin' Leads with Sharp Decline

According to ZachXBT (via Cointelegraph), at least 12 Solana presale memecoins have been "completely abandoned" in the previous 30 days after generating $26.7 million from investors.

In an April 21 post on X, ZachXBT documented 12 Solana memecoin projects that collected funding through the contentious presale approach, several of which have since plummeted and one that appears to have launched no token.

According to ZachXBT, the most costly "abandoned" presale project was a memecoin called 'I like this coin' with the ticker LIKE.

The project's pseudonymous founder, pokeee.eth raised a staggering 52,220 Solana (SOL) ($7.7 million at current prices) for the memecoin and launched it on March 17 with a market capitalization of $577 million; however, the meme coin's value plummeted dramatically, falling more than 90% in the first 8 hours.

As of publication, LIKE has dropped 99.2% from its debut price. Notably, the memecoin's official X account hasn't posted anything new since March 31, and pokeee.eth hasn't addressed the coin since then, either.

MOONKE Crashes 99% Post-Launch, Echoing Troubled ICO Boom; Slerf Burns Stir Investor Frenzy

The second-largest purported abandoned presale is for a coin named MOONKE.

MOONKE, founded by another pseudonymous creator, RockyXBT, on March 20 with an outsized valuation of roughly $500 million, quickly followed in the footsteps of LIKE, dropping more than 99% of its launch price in just a few hours.

One project raised 4,567 SOL ($812,000 at current pricing) but never issued a token. Cointelegraph contacted Pokeee and RockyXBT for comments but received no answer at the time of publication.

Several market pundits compared last month's memecoin frenzy to the 2017 Ethereum initial coin offering (ICO) boom, during which hundreds of crypto ventures received millions of dollars but eventually failed to deliver.

One of the most notorious Solana pre-sale debacles in recent months occurred in March, when the developer of Slerf, a memecoin, claimed to have mistakenly burned the whole pre-sale allocation of SLERF in a "fat finger" burn mishap.

Despite the Slerf developer burning an astonishing amount of 535,000 SOL (worth over $10 million at the time), the coin immediately became a cult favorite among memecoin investors, who rallied around the token and saw it climb to a peak of around $750 million market cap.

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